Not applicable.
Research and development of the present invention and application have not been Federally sponsored, and no rights are given under any Federal program.
1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to an acoustic signaling system involving acoustic sound codes that are pleasant sounding and convey information which can be received reliably in the presence of normal room echo and ambient noise. In a preferred embodiment, the code signals a doll to act in a predetermined manner such as crying, sleeping, laughing, etc. The system uses short bursts of sound separated by gaps to overcome the echo problem and can be incorporated in almost any electronic product allowing the product to receive commands from broadcast material. The system may be incorporated in a virtual pet, an automated exercise machine or games or may be adapted to make various products such as VCR""s interactive.
2. Description of the Related Art Including Information Disclosed UNER 37 CFR xc2xa7xc2xa71.97-1.98
This invention relates to an acoustic signaling system involving acoustic sound codes that arm pleasant sounding and conveys information which can be received reliably in the presence of normal room echo and ambient noise. In a preferred embodiment, the code signals a doll to act in a predetermined manner such as crying, sleeping, laughing, etc. The system uses short bursts of sound separated by gaps to overcome the echo problem and can be incorporated in almost any electronic product allowing the product to receive commands from broadcast material. The system may be incorporated in a virtual pet, an automated exercise machine or games or may be adapted to make various products such as (VCRs) interactive.
It is also a requirement of the present invention that the codes be reliably received as described above using inexpensive electronics in both the transmitter and receiver. The present system is economical today, and works well, and further, the codes will be even more reliably received using tomorrow""s technology.
The present invention has the further advantage that the transmitted sound codes are audible but not decipherable to the average listener. We refer to this quality as anonymity. Another advantage of the present invention is that in an implementation using an existing product such as a television as the transmitter of the sound codes said product does not require any modification or outboard circuitry to be connected to it.
The prior art includes acoustic data transmission systems of the following types:
1. An acoustic coupler as used with a modem, couples closely with a telephone handset, using a rubber shroud to increase the coupling and block out extraneous sounds. This system will provide a good data rate of up to 1200 baud or even higher, but will not work if the elements are separated by more than a fraction of an inch. If an attempt is made to increase the operating distance by increasing the loudness of the transmitting elements and increasing the sensitivity of the receiving elements, the system will not work due to increased group delay distortion, echo, mixture with ambient sound, and room echo and cancellations.
2. A sending device producing a whistle-like sound may be used to trigger a response in a receiving device. A PC can generate such a sound, which would be, more or less, a continuous tone. To aid in noise rejection, the tone could be made to last for a specific length of time, such as one second. Then, different frequencies might be used to trigger different specific responses in the receiver. A few of the problems that such a system will suffer from are false triggers from voice or musical sounds in the vicinity, difficulty in reception of certain frequencies due to mom cancellations and reflections, the annoying nature of such long steady sounds to the listener, difficulty in designing receiver electronics with adequate dynamic range at reasonable cost, poor reception due to uncertainty in the receiver over whether or not the signal is the correct one out of the many sounds floating in the air, and lack of anonymity.
In any real-world situation, sound waves will spread out from the source until they hit obstacles, then reflect and, if not absorbed, continue traveling in a new direction according to all the well known wave propagation laws. Any effective communication system will have to deal with these echoes.
It is theoretically possible to compensate digitally for room echoes, if: a) enough digital processing power is available, and b) if the A/D) converter in a reception system has sufficient accuracy (dynamic range and high signal/noise ratio). The difficulty of digitally compensating for echoes is exacerbated if the receiving or transmitting device is moving within the room, as the echo trajectories must be continuously recalculated. In such a case digital removal of echoes may be, for practical purposes, not possible. The present invention attacks the echo problem by designing the transmitted tones to have a high degree of immunity to the echo problem. Basically, there are no appropriate acoustic signaling systems in the prior art, which involve applicant""s unique features.
This invention relates to acoustic signaling systems and particularly to a system utilizing a transmitter to provide a predetermined acoustic code to a receiver to control the action of the device incorporating or controlled by the receiver. The transmitter is an electronic device, which creates acoustic signaling sounds in its internal software or plays back a previously created recording of the signaling sounds. In a preferred embodiment, the transmitter is a PC or Mac and a doll comes with a CD-ROM programmed to produce these codes through the computer""s speaker at appropriate times.
The receiver comprises an electret microphone and a limiting amplifier, which has high gain and limits or produces a maximum output for any input signal above a minimum value. The amplifier also has a high frequency roll-off to eliminate high ultrasonic frequencies from the amplifier.
A Schmitt trigger circuit xe2x80x9csquares upxe2x80x9d the output of the limiting amplifier and functions as a zero cross detector producing a square wave that is xe2x80x9chighxe2x80x9d if the input waveform is positive and xe2x80x9clowxe2x80x9d if the input waveform is negative.
A micro-controller is used to measure the times of the zero crossings and determine what code is being listened to by the receiver. The micro-controller also controls all of the functions of the doll in the preferred embodiment, which includes controlling the motors and generating speech.
Each code consists of a repeating series of tones, which are each transmitted for a certain duration followed by a silence. The transmission gap allows room echoes to decay naturally. The burst nature of the sound allows it to penetrate where longer tones would otherwise be eaten up by reflections and standing waves.
A subset of the available codes has the characteristic that each code in the subset, in comparison to the other codes in the subject, is unidentifiable to the above human listener. These codes area referred to as the so-called xe2x80x9cAnonymous Codes.xe2x80x9d A communication system can be designed in such a way that the Anonymous codes are used in places where their characteristic is desirable or necessary.
The present invention can be included in virtually any electronic products or added to a product to make it electronic in order to enable the product to receive commands from broadcast material. The broadcast material may be in the form of radio, television, Internet, VCR, DVD cassette players, etc. The claimed technology can also be adapted to make various products interactive and broadcast television could download program information regarding subject matter, start times, etc., to a product through the use of the present invention if incorporated into a remote control unit for the TV or other media device.
Accordingly, an object of this invention is to provide a new and improved acoustic signaling system.
Another object of this invention is to provide a new and improved acoustic signaling system, which is reliable and inexpensive.
Another object of this invention is to provide a new and improved acoustic signaling system using anonymous sounding codes which the average human listener can hear because they are acoustic but cannot identify.
A further object of this invention is to provide a new and improved acoustic signaling system which produces acoustic sound codes involving short bursts of sound separated by gaps to permit room echoes to decay and to permit the sound to penetrate where longer tones would be eaten up by reflections and standing waves.
A still further object of this invention is to provide a new and improved acoustic signaling system which includes a computer transmitter which sends preselected sound codes in bursts to a receiver which includes an electret microphone, a limiting amplifier, a Schmitt trigger circuit functioning as a zero cross detector and a micro-controller to determine what code is being transmitted and effectuate control operations on a toy embodying the receiver.
A more specific object of this invention is to provide a new and improved acoustic signaling system is to provide an inexpensive yet effective transmitting and a receiving system responsive to short bursts of selected acoustic signals each followed by silence, generated by a computer, to control the functioning of a doll through a receiver with responses to various codes generated by the transmitter.
Another object of this invention is to provide a new and improved wide range receiver mode possible by design of the tones and codes and exploited to the maximum inexpensive embodiment.